Good-bye Garden

Here's the last of my harvest pictures. My parent's garden had 6 jalapeno pepper plants and 4 Santa Fe pepper plants (what were they thinking?) and my garden had 4 Serrano pepper plants. So what do you do with all those peppers besides putting them in salsa and enchilada sauce? Well I don't know what you do, but I pickled them. Out of everything I canned this fall, I think I'm most proud of these pickled peppers. David loves pickled peppers but they cost about $2.40 for a 12 ounce can. I pickled 16 quarts of peppers and that's a savings of $102.40. YEAH! And besides that, they look really pretty in the jars because the Santa Fe peppers are red, orange and yellow.

I did end up canning the last of my peaches. I don't actually like eating canned peaches because I don't like the texture. So I eat them in smoothies, milkshakes and jello salads but my boys eat them. And again I think they look pretty in the jars. I would can them just to look at the pretty fruit. However, I obviously should have worked harder at getting the air bubbles out of the jars.

David took this picture of me weighing my tomatoes on my bathroom scale. He thought it was hilarious. But I don't know any other way to do it. So help me...if someone has some great idea or better yet a produce scale let me know. But for now I will use my bathroom scale to measure out a 1/2 bushel of tomatoes.

Lastly we picked our pumpkin. Okay, it's Jacob's pumpkin. At playgroup last spring, Stephanie McArthur helped the boys plant pumpkin seeds in little plastic cups. Jacob was soooo excited to see his seed sprout so we transplanted it to the flower bed by the peach tree. We only got one pumpkin out of it because I think it didn't have enough sun but it's a good size pumpkin and Jacob couldn't be happier. So that's a success. Adam's little pumpkin is from the pumpkin patch. Next year I'll do better with the pumpkins since they were such a hit with the boys. Now Jacob's terrified someone is going to steal his pumpkin and wants to bring in it from the porch every night. Last year someone smashed our pumpkins in the road and Jacob hasn't recovered from the trauma.

Okay so here's the finally count for the year:

green enchilada sauce: 20 quarts

fruit cocktail from my nectarines and peaches: 22 quarts

canned peaches: 16 quarts

red salsa: 20 quarts

speghetti sauce: 9 quarts

pickled peppers: 16 quarts

Thank you, thank you to everyone for the recipes, help and hints and to mom and dad for letting me have the produce from their garden. I think our little garden was a roaring success and it's been lot of fun to learn some new skills this year. Now the plants have frozen and while my plan was to cover them I'm actually kind of glad that plan failed because I'm pretty sick of doing tomatoes. I do still have onions out there but that's it.